Saturday, May 24, 2008

Collaborators Wanted - Apply Within

I need collaborators. I need people to bounce ideas off of. I need creative people to feel creative. Right now, I don't have any around me.

In gaming, this is easy. I create an adventure, and there is an audience for it... or more accurately, there are a bunch of critics at my table that tear it apart. ;) I just need a few notes and I run from there.

But publishing? I'm not in it for the money, and the possibility of making money is really slim anyway. I tend to self-destruct businesswise, as in any financial success just means I can spend more on the next project and still break even with it.

But the creation of publishable material is hard work. That work is just interminable if I'm sitting in my room thinking and typing with the idea of releasing something some months in the future. Yeah, the stuff I write gets tested at my table first, but there is a large difference between what I need to write to run a game myself, and what I need to write for other people to use.

I need shiny happy creators to bounce ideas off of, to test out descriptive text, to look at imbedded in-jokes to see if they work. I need people to say, "Coooooooooool!" and "You are a wild man!" and "Wait a minute, are you sure about that?" and "Stuuuuuuuuuppppppppppiiiiiiiiddddddddddddd!"

I need people to deliver feedback on my blogs, suggestions for things to write about, and general critiques of all my ideas (I know I know, stop swearing so much.) I love critiques. And arguments.

3 comments:

I can sympathise with this feeling; my main experience of it is via academic dislocation, where your mates just cannot help and fellow students are working in an utterly different field. It is hard to find a balance between creative control and collaborative discussion.

I liked the idea of Hackmaster, but it was just too much of everything. To me, the point of playing D&D versus something else is the ability to just pick up and *play*. You can't do that with Hackmaster.

That said, I thought some of their adventures were awesome, like the expanded Keep on the Borderlands and the tie-ins to In Search of the Unknown.

Lots of good stuff there, but I'd use it for D&D and not Hackmaster itself, if there's a real difference.